Never Graduate Week 2018

Last week I worked from Recurse Center’s annual Never Graduate Week, or as I explain to my friends “alumni week for programming camp.” While I was working the whole time, I did get to go to a few events, and focus on some interesting things.

Projects

Like I said, I was working, so my projects were work related. We shipped labels at IOpipe, which I’ve been working on for a bit and think provides a lot of visibility into your Lambda functions.

NGW was also an opportunity to iterate on and practice for my upcoming talk at Monitorama – I’m pretty much extremely intimidated, because I respect and probably admire anyone who’s coming to this conference as an attendee, so how intimidated am I to show up in June as a speaker 😨 The very good news though, is that the kind people of RC both enjoyed the rough cut of the talk and gave me lots of fantastic feedback, so it’s going to be ok. Right? It’ll be ok right??

I also started working on our Go agent, starting from some contributor’s code and working on getting the agent talking to our data pipeline, and working in the open on an agent in a newer [to Lambda] runtime. For me, this was starting from”let’s do the Go tutorial” and is really interesting. I paired with my buddy Steven, asking a ton of questions, and Go is so cool! It really feels like working in a language I’ve prepared for — like oh, you’ve been reading/reviewing Java lately? What’s up statically typed language. You learned about pointers back in college? Cool, you got those here nbd. And the general syntax/feel is Node.js-y.

Events and Activities

While I decided to work during NGW to not fall behind on work, it was really possible to fill my schedule with talks and activities if I wanted to! I did take advantage and go to a couple, my favorites being:

Thinking Critically About Your Job (a very helpful exercise)

Mindy Preston’s Localhost talk about unikernels

The second round of Thursday presentations, including git tableflip, and playing Battleship using routers

I also went to a talk about “when the cloud catches fire” but I wasn’t fully engaged (was partially work computering), and some of a session during the unconference, but left to go work on more Golang 🙂

Next time

Next time, I’d really love to have the week off to really have an open-ended focus! Even so, I got a lot of things done in the productivity bucket, and it was so wonderful in the emotional bucket to see all these people I like a lot (and meet some new ones as well!)